iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Matthieu Aikins underscored the need to protect the contents of your smartphone. If the potential to have your own information stollen or generally snooped through your stuff, please consider this story.

The British journalist and filmmaker Sean McAllister was in Syriashooting a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 about the underground there. A few he had worked with were concerned about his general lack of care about his communications and protection of the identities of those in the underground he was working with.

In October, McAllister was detained by Syrian security agents. Well detained he could hear the cries of prisoners being tortured in nearby rooms. He was interrogated and had all of his electronics seized and searched.

Upon hearing that security forces had McCallister a few individuals who had been in touch with, including the main source of the article, immediately fled fearing the brutal Syrian regime now had information that put their lives at risk. Others in McAllister’s electronic records, like one Omar al-Baroudi, were never heard from again.

The article uses the example to point to the need for journalist and the organizations that employ them to become more aware of how to protect their digital information. I hope this stark example will encourage everyone with a smartphone to consider protecting the information on it and information available to it.

If not, please consider the potential embracement of a malevolent or mischievous individual finding your smartphone and posting to Facebook or Twitter on your behalf (though I would understand that it would be nice if someone update your Google Plus account).
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The BlackBerry Playbook coming out on April 19^th has some familiar plays in it – if you grew-up in Ontario:

1. RIM is a Waterloo-based company
2. RIM is/was known for their trackball
3. The device is running the QNX operating system, developed by Waterloo/Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems (which RIM just bought)
4. The screen and input device is are an all-in-one deisgn
5. The whole enterprise seems like a string of poor decisions to create something that will be expensive and will not be successful

Where have we seen these plays before?

The Unisys ICON! Wikipedia Article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON

The computer built specifically for use in Ontario schools commissioned by the Ontario Ministry of Education.

(Thanks for the image, Old-Computers.com)

Unisys ICON computers were kicking around my public school when I was a kid. They didn’t do much beyond very basic word-processing and had a lot of games on them, thanks to the local board of education, and a few of my friends. They were all networked, and relatively reliable, save for the poor teacher/”computer lead” who gave admin access to some of the Grade 8 students.

The ICONs had a trackball (the PlayBook won’t, but the BlackBerry Pearl and others do), it had an all-in-one hardware design, and sat in the corner of our classroom, mostly unused.

The most relevant commonality is that the old ICONs were running the QNX operating system!

The ICON was ultimately deemed too expensive to keep in use or develop for and was cast-off in favour of Apple and others’ more user friendly products.

So now you know Ontario: when you think BlackBerry Playbook, think Unisys ICON.

Apparently two more things they have in common is no E-Mail application and they both can’t connect to the internet on their own!
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If you use a Mac, and you haven’t had a chance to install it yet, I’d like to recommend AppleJack.

AppleJack is a free open source tool that automates the basic UNIX tools are a few other basic maintenance tasks for OSX. All things someone comfortable with the command line could do themselves, but AppleJack automates the process and more. It’s routine repairs disk contents, repairs permissions, validate the system’s preference files, and gets rid of possibly corrupted cache files.

In my experience AppleJack is as good or better than commercial OSX maintenance tools and makes the most of the proven command line disk maintenance tools that come with almost all UNIX operating systems.

Once you have visited applejack.sourceforge.net and downloaded and installed AppleJack it is ready to be run. To run it restart in Single User Mode (SUM), by holding down Command + S keys at startup, and then when prompted type applejack, or applejack auto (which will run through all the tasks automatically), or applejack auto restart (which will also restart the computer automatically at the end of the process).

One of my favourite features of AppleJack is that it lets you issue commands like applejack auto shutdown to have it run through its whole routine and shutdown the computer when it’s done. A great task to run at the end of the day, and it looks really hacker-cool when its running.

I run AppleJack every once and a while, or when something goes wrong for un-explained reasons. Occasionally it catches problems and alerts me, but mostly I feel the benefits of good computer hygiene.

Running a mail server is hard work. This is largely because it puts you on the front line of the battle with the internet’s biggest scourge: spam. My recommendation: don’t do it.

When I setup a new web site and domain, or when I am helping another organization setup their Email etcetera my preference is to sign-up for Google Apps and Gmail Email.

What is now Google Apps started with “Gmail For Your Domain” and now includes Gmail, Docs (documents), Groups, Sites and Chat. The standard edition is free for 50 accounts or less, above that it’s $50 per user per year.

The best part is Google handles all the spam filtering, gives users a number of Gigs of storage (7Gigs the last time I checked) and handles all the redundancy, backup etc, but it is worth noticing their no enterprise-esh recovery options.

There is even a Canadian connection in that Lakehead University in Thunder Bay was one of the first major domains to migrate everyone’s E-Mail. Many of the faculty objected to their Email being routed through the united states, but at least they were able to setup their iPhones with their work Email on Christmas day.

The most compelling reasons is that you get your mail via the best web interface going, as well as POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers that are all encrypted. Plus I’m a big fan of Google calendar system — I’m a big fan of calendar’ing systems in general.

Google Docs can be a bit of “lifestyle” change, but if you are interested working on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online it’s a great service, espcially if you want to either work with others collaboratively in a work-flow or for sharing with an audience.
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FYI: I just turned on Google Analytics again on my site.

I’m trying to reduce the load on my server as much as possible for the inevitable day when the site goes viral. I’ve also been tracking the whole site via the excellent AW Stats tool at mattclare.ca/awstats/awstats.pl — which is intentionally public.

I’ll keep using AW Stats for a bit, but once the site’s viral, it’s coming off — or when I get around to it. We’ll see which comes first.